Author: Neal Whitman

Sponsor: This episode is brought to you by NatureBox. Discover smarter snacking with a new NatureBox each month. Get 50% off your first box when you go to NatureBox.com/grammar . Today we’re going to talk about unusual sentences you may have heard from people in customer service. So if you’ve ever wondered why someone behind the counter says, “Did you want cream in your coffee?” instead of “Do you want cream in your coffee?” or “I can help who’s next” instead of “I can help whoever’s next,” stay tuned. Why Do People Use the Past Tense? Using the past tense…

Sponsor: Want to save more, invest for the future, but don’t have time to be a full-on investor? Betterment.com helps you build a customized, low-cost portfolio that suits your goals. Sign up at this link and receive a $25 bonus when you make a deposit of $250 or more. In Standard English, the word “because” can be used two ways. One of them is to introduce a clause, as in “Aardvark was late because he was waiting for the repairman to show up.” Used this way, “because” is a subordinating conjunction. The other is to team up with “of” to…

A Grammar Girl follower on Twitter named Aaron Heintz  tweeted a question earlier this month. He asked, “Why do we use plural form of verbs with the singular subject ‘I’. e.g. ‘I go to the store.’” @grammargirl why do we use plural form of verbs with the singular subject “I”. e.g. I go to the store. #subjectverb #agreement. — Aaron Heintz (@AaronHeintz) May 16, 2013 Verbs Have a Number, Tense, and Person When he talks about singular and plural, he’s talking about what grammarians call number, but the assumption that “go” is a plural form is not entirely correct. In addition…

A question that I get now and then is whether W is ever a vowel. At first, I was puzzled by this question, but it turns out that grammar books from the 19th century and earlier sometimes did include W as a vowel. I’m not sure why grammar writers stopped doing it, or when the “A, E, I, O, U, and sometimes Y” that many of us learned in school became standard, but today we’re going to learn not only when Y, and maybe even W, can be a vowel. Actually, here’s a spoiler: They’re not, and neither are…

Several listeners have written with questions on when to use the definite article “the,” the indefinite article “a,” or neither. For example, Tracy W. wrote, “Which is correct: ‘Thank you for taking time to review my application,’ or ‘Thank you for taking the time to review my application’?” The use of articles is a tricky subject, with many exceptions and idiosyncrasies. We can’t cover all the cases today, but we can look at the basic rules and see how they apply to Tracy’s question. Nouns That Need Determiners: Countable Singular Nouns We’ll start with some facts about nouns. First, some…